Well, its officially the beginning of December and if you happen to be a university student, like myself, you’re probably reading this post through an endless stream of tears, holding two mitt-fulls of hair the you’ve pulled out, while desperately trying to keep track of 37 open web-browser tabs, as assignment due dates relentlessly tap on your window with fully extended claws. The stress is very real for students this time of year: final assignments and essays take up the time needed to work on group projects, which in turn eats into study time for final exams. And those readings you’re supposed to finish for those last couple classes? Good luck. Sometimes it feels as if it’s never going to end, like you’re stuck on the spin cycle, like every crest on the mountain hides more in the clouds. Imagine if you could watch a video looking to the version of yourself in the near future, leaning back, sipping some tea, triumphantly closing all 37 browser tabs one by one with the world’s most relieved smile on your face. Wouldn’t that be great? Wouldn’t that give you some hope that school mountain is somehow conquerable?

 PhD student Carl Vondrick and MIT Professor Antonio Torralba at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), along with former CSAIL postdoc and current professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County Hamed Pirsiavash, and their CSAIL team, are currently using their computer-science-magic abilities to create very brief videos that simulate the future of given still images. These predictive videos are based on a deep-learning algorithm the team at MIT is developing. In other words, researchers input a still image, the algorithm goes to work, and outputs a video that predicts the next 1-2 seconds of action in the scene. The algorithm was originally trained on 2 million videos representing about 2 years’ worth of footage.

(Simple right?)

MIT News reporters Adam Conner-Simons and Rachel Gordon report that the process works using two competing neural networks, one which “generates video, while the second discriminates between real and generated videos”. If the video can fool the discriminator network, then it could potentially also fool people. After running into issues with frame-by-frame predictions the researchers used techniques (that I most certainly do not possess the capacity to explain) to train the model to simultaneously generate the frames all at once, which increases the accuracy of the predictions while drastically increasing the complexity. The researchers also had to teach the model to generate backgrounds separate from foregrounds and to determine which objects in the images move and which remain stationary. The project explanation video shows generated scenes on a beach, at a train station, in a hospital, and of sporting events. Simons and Gordon report that “the algorithm generated videos that human subjects deemed to be realistic 20 percent more often than a baseline model”.

Here is the part where I offer my opinion, and more specifically some questions about this project; namely: Is this art that this algorithm is creates? Composition, lighting, movement, focus, depth of field, perception, these are all factors that professional directors and creators practice and train to master. These current generated videos are, by technical necessity, extremely short and rudimentary, but the fact that an algorithm can create videos that can fool a person into believing them to be real is pretty darn mind blowing. It is also, in my opinion, slightly concerning when it comes to the future if math and computing can even take our creativity away from us?

Or perhaps maybe I’m a bit loopy from all the homework. Maybe I can send MIT picture of my blank Word document and the algorithm can “predict” my next essay for me? No? Darn.

By: Warren Fuller

On 14 November 2016 Decimal Lab’s representative and post-doctoral fellow Dr. Andrew Iliadis travelled to the aWear2016 conference at Stanford University to unveil Decimal Lab’s Fabric digital archive to the public for the first time.

Fabric explores the emergence of human-computer interaction (HCI) through, as the About section states “the language of invention: inventor’s concepts, entrepreneurial adventures, science fiction films, military innovation, video games, government ambitions, patents, news broadcasts, blogs, and advertising.” Essentially, the archive seeks to house as many depictions or explanations, whether real or fictional, of instances of digital embodiment, that is, the merging of the human body with digital artifacts.

(Detail of an artifact in the Fabric database)

Decimal Lab director and Fabric overseer Dr. Isabel Pedersen’s project frames humanity’s technological future along a “continuum of embodiment”, an argument she first proposed in her book Ready to Wear: A Rhetoric of Wearable Computers and Reality-shifting Media, published in 2013. To decipher that language, the definition of continuum is “noun: a continuous sequence in which adjacent elements are not perceptibly different from each other, although the extremes are quite distinct”. Consider the timeline before mobile phones became ubiquitous in modern culture, basically every problem in every sitcom could be solved instantly today with a single text message and communicating with anyone outside your immediate vicinity meant either walking over to the corner store to pick up a long-distance calling card or racking up substantial phone bills. Now it’s difficult to imagine how we could function on a day to day basis without mobile phones (or realistically, miniature computers that also happen to come preloaded with a phone app). 

In recent years the mobile technology trend has shifted from devices we carry around to devices that we wear on our person; Fitbits, smart watches, and other wearable interfaces further push the technology from separate devices to extensions of our own bodies. Even as we speak researchers and developers are blowing right by the wearable phase, looking further ahead to implantable and ingestible devices. The concept of implantable devices as a ubiquitous, daily, fact of life is as foreign today as the concept of mobile phones was to people in the 80s and early 90s. Fabric exists to track and document these technological developments over time as a resource to researchers, students, developers, or simply curious people interested in modern technology. The ever-vigilant Fabric archivists continuously update the database as new technological developments seem to spring up on a daily basis.

Far from focusing solely on technology that currently exists or what is currently in development, Fabric also hosts a vast collection of artifacts that depict technological developments from the realm of science-fiction. Technological advancements often appear in fiction and science-fiction long before real life technology is feasible. Oft-cited examples include the communicator from the original Star Trek series, which closely resembles what would eventually become cellphones, and the interconnected virtual world in William Gibson’s dystopian 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, which serves as inspiration of MMORPGs and internet communities today.

Each artifact in the Fabric data base is meticulously tagged into categories including HCI platform (Carryable, Wearable, Implantable, Ingestible, and Bionic), Persuasive type (Academic, Art, Advertisement, Entertainment, etc.), media type (academic paper, feature film, photograph, fictional novel, etc.), location on the body, and many others, which allows the user to perform exceptionally customized searches. For example, if we search for an academic journal article that focuses on implantable technology in the abdomen we find a paper form the journal Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research entitled Design and Evaluation of a Robust PID Controller for a Fully Implantable Artificial Pancreas. On the other, if the academic wing isn’t your bag, we can search for an ingestible technology in a feature film an we’re directed to a video clip of the protagonist Eddie from the film Limitless consuming his brain enhancing drug for the first time. As of this writing Fabric contains 1421individual objects, including clips from 75 feature films.

(Fabric timeline view of wearable technology)

One particularly interesting feature of Fabric is the Timeline view of search results, which can be found at the top right of the search results display. The timeline arranges the filtered search results in chronological order so users can track the development and depiction of technological developments over time. For example, a search for “bionic contacts” yields 65 artifact results going back to the depiction of bionic eyes in the 1991 film Terminator 2. Following along the timeline display we find a 2008 ScienCentral News video discussing the potential applications for bionic contacts, to a 2012 Solve for X talk from Babak Parvis discussing the potential of his conceptual bionic contact lens, through to a handful of articles from 2016 highlighting tech giant Sony patenting a bionic contact lens camera design. Through this timeline view we can the ascension of bionic contact technology from a fictional sci-fi concept to a viable consumer product.  

By: Warren Fuller

Okay, here’s the setting: You’ve just purchased a shiny new VR headset alongside a shiny new computer powerful enough to run flawless virtual reality simulations. Desperate to get your mind off the gaping void this purchase left in what used to be your savings account you load up the immersive experience of your absolute favourite film, Pan’s Labyrinth. As you are sneaking around the Pale Man to retrieve the special dagger, the abundant feast spread over the table beckons you. You’re know you’re not supposed to take anything but those grapes…they look so succulent. You look to make sure that the Pale Man is still motionless then reach out, grab one of the grapes, raise it to your mouth, and… nothing. It’s just a simulation, those grapes aren’t real at all. Immersion effectively ruined (and thoughts of virtual moths flying around in your empty savings account creep back into the front of you mind). But fear not gentle reader, for scientists and developers have anticipated your struggle and have begun the task of developing virtual food.

Nimesha Ranasinghe and Ellen Yi-Luen Do, at the National University of Singapore, are working on a device that uses rapid temperature variations to fool the user’s brain with the sensation of taste. As described by Victoria Turk from New Scientist, by rapidly heating and cooling the device effectively hijacks the neurons in the mouth that code the sense of taste for the brain. Ranasinghe is no stranger to the (I imagine still quite small) community of virtual taste developers, having previously worked on another taste synthesizing device as well as an electric spoon. This new thermal-stimulation device was specifically created to synthesize sweet tastes, which was less successfully replicated in previous projects. The device was first presented at the 2016 ACM User Interface Software and Technology Symposium (Holy smokes, I implore you to watch the program preview video at this link, some of these technologies are absolutely insane)  The project is currently only in the initial trial stage and reportedly was only successful for about half of the study participants, however the researchers are hopeful for the potential applications of this technology, not just in virtual reality but in real world settings as well. For example, the technology could be imbedded in a piece of drinkware to add artificial sweetness to unsweetened health drinks (or linked to a VR headset so you can finally savour those forbidden grapes. I ain’t afraid of no Pale Men).

Meanwhile, researchers Arinobu Niijima and Takefumi Ogawa from the University of Tokyo are independently working on the virtual version of the other component of mouth feel, texture. Their Electric Food Texture System uses electrodes placed on masseter muscle (the chewing muscle on the jaw) to stimulate muscle and approximate the sensation of chewing; higher frequency stimulation for harder textures and low frequency pulses for softer or elastic textures. On top of providing virtual food textures, the technology can also be paired with real food to modify real food textures.

Both of these projects represent leaps forward into a potential of virtual reality technology that, until researching this piece, I hadn’t even conceptualized. And while this technology may place humanity one step closer to a plugged-in pod-people Matrix-esque existence, at least we’ll be able to taste the grapes delicious we steal from the Pale Man, before he tastes us.  

By: Warren Fuller

I imagine many of you wonderful people are familiar with the following scenario: You’re on your way out the door to work or school and everything is coming up as Millhouse as Millhouse gets; your toast came out perfect, your hair and make-up is looking absolutely mint, and you’re running a good ten minutes early. Life is magnificent. As you’re bounding down the stairs you feel your phone vibrate in your pocket, probably Brad sending another one of his hilarious off-colour jokes. You eagerly and hastily pull your phone out of your pocket (in breathless anticipation of the forthcoming belly laugh) without realizing you still have slightly buttery toast-fingers. Horrified you watch, in slow motion, as the phone bounces off the 7th, 4th, and 1st step before landing, screen-down of course, with a sickening slap (no bounce). “Oh god oh god, please please please” you whimper in vain as you bend down to pick it up; but you already know it’s fate. Smashy Smashy.

Wouldn’t it be pretty sweet if, instead of having to shell out your birthday money on an expensive screen repair or a whole new device, the phone just healed itself? “Yeah, keep dreaming Fuller” you’re thinking, “then I suppose I’ll just use my self-healing phone to ring up the tooth fairy and ask for my baby molars back eh?” Well yes, self-healing devices are still pretty much a fantasy. But they’re working on it, okay? Well, sort of…

Joseph Wang and his team at the nanoengineering lab at the University of California, San Diego is currently working on a solution for self-healing devices using magnetic ink. Essentially (and I am way simplifying this explanation) the lab has created an ink that contains pulverized magnets. When the ink is cut or separated the microscopic magnets attract each other and repair the cut. According to Steph Yin’s The New York Times article about the project the current incarnation of the ink can “repair multiple cuts up to three millimeters long in just 50 milliseconds”.

One goal of the project, stated by Amay Bandodkar who co-authored the study, is to create wearable devices that are more skin-like; in that they are able to repair themselves as well as stretch and move than current smart-fabrics, which are both more rigid and more expensive. Dr. Bandodkar notes that current self-healing polymerizing materials are costly and require external sources and chemical reactions, while the magnetic ink is very cost effective and would continue to heal even after innumerable repairs. A demonstration video, hosted on The Times article, shows a small printed electronic device attached to a t-shirt completing a circuit from a battery to a small light. The device is cut in half with scissors, breaking the circuit and extinguishing the light. However, after a few agonizing seconds, the device repairs itself, completing the circuit, and the light shines once again. The authors of the study state that they hope their inks could one day have practical applications in wearable and mobile devices, solar panels, and/or implanted medical devices.

By: Warren Fuller

So hey, guess what? Well, as it turns out, a combined study by Tim Althoff from Stanford University and Ryen White and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research has determined that playing video games can substantially increase the physical health of the player! That’s right parents everywhere, a Stanford study has determined that playing video games is healthy. (Kids, stop reading this to your parents at this point. Your joy concerning those first two sentences is about to be immediately dashed). Okay, video games is not entirely accurate, more like video game. More specifically, the Stanford/Microsoft study found that players of the massively popular Pokémon Go augmented reality game significantly increased player’s activity levels “regardless of their age, sex, or weight.” For the benefit of the 12 or so people who are unfamiliar with Pokémon Go (you didn’t read our article about it last year? Shame on you), the mobile game encourages users to explore their surroundings to find virtual Pokémon in the ‘real world’, via mobile-device GPS and location services. In order to find more Pokémon and ‘Catch ‘em All’ players must be on the move; sedentary players are less likely to discover new Pokémon. Additionally, players may find or purchase Pokémon eggs that will only hatch after the player has travelled a certain distance (2 km, 5km 10km, etc.). In order to be successful in the game players need to travel, and accidentally exercise as a side effect. According to the study, reported by BBC.com, the Pokémon Go phenomenon resulted in an average increase of 192 steps per day after the first 30 days of playing, with highly committed players taking about 1,473 extra steps. The researchers estimated that the Go craze added an estimated 144 billion steps to the total physical activity in the United States.

As you can probably imagine, there is a major caveat to this study: Any lasting or long term health benefits require long term commitment to going out and playing the game. As far as Pokémon Go…um…goes, the rising popularity of the hashtag #RIPPokémonGO says everything you need to know about the lasting commitment players have to the temporarily ubiquitous mobile game (The augmented reality novelty aspect of the game wore of pretty quickly once players realized that the game wasn’t really all that fun. Plus, I don’t believe anyone wants to see another Pidgey or Ratatta again in their entire life.). While Pokémon Go may have come and gone in a flash, the researchers remain optimistic suggesting “novel mobile games which require players to physically move in the real world appear to be an effective complement to traditional physical activity and they are able to reach millions of engaged users.”

While I don’t believe that the game developers ascribe a particularly high priority to the physical fitness of their customers I do find it very interesting, from a social science perspective, to see how the popularity of a single mobile game affected the daily activity routine of so many players. The millennial part of me is excited to see the direction augmented reality and mobile technology is headed: What will be the next massive cultural experience that will get people outside again? Or, will video games even ever make us go outside again? Or is Pokémon Go an unrepeatable phenomenon that cashed in on the timely nostalgia thirst of a certain generation?  

By: Warren Fuller

If you can, in these times of reduced memory and attention spans, filter way back through all the memes, hurtful forum comments, dubious public interest stories, and the rest of the memes then you may remember the fiasco that was Tay. Tay was an AI Twitter chat-bot (created in collaboration between Microsoft’s Technology and Research team and Microsoft’s Bing team) launched in March 2016. The bot was programmed to pass for a teenager, using conversational language and slang popularized in social media networks, comment sections, and forums. Unfortunately for…well for pretty much everybody, it took less than 24 hours for the swarm intelligence of Twitter to corrupt our vapid, carefree, and innocent teen-bot into a hate speech spewing monster, at which point the bot was promptly shut down. The fiasco that was Tay is merely one concrete example of the fallibility of artificial intelligence.

(Photo by Prachi Patel)

Amazon, Deep Mind/Google, Facebook, IBM, and Microsoft have partnered to launch the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society (Partnership on AI). According to the organization’s press release the objective of the Partnership on AI is to “address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society”. In addition to representatives from the major corporations spearheading the partnership the organization will also invite academics, non-profit organizations, and other specialists. The press release also insists that the Board of the organization will employ equal representation of corporate and non-corporate members. The Partnership on AI recognizes the potential medical, educational, industrial, social, and domestic applications artificial intelligence increasingly potentially hold, while understanding that there needs to be conversations concerning best practices with emerging AI technologies. Of the main goals of the Partnership, as quoted in an article by Prachi Patel, Facebook AI Director Yann LeCun said “We want it to be a forum to discuss issues on proper deployment, best practices, and ethical questions” and “The other purpose is to explain the state-of-the-art in AI and what it can do in the future.”

This Partnership is intriguing as it shows that major corporations, at least superficially, are willing to admit that there needs to be some democratic discussion about the implementation of Artificial Intelligence technologies in society. However, when the entities leading the ethical discussion about Artificial Intelligence are representatives from the major conglomerates producing the very same Artificial Intelligences, there is a good deal of room for bias. True democratic technological citizenship requires public participation in these forums to determine which technologies and technological practices are more or less beneficial in society as a whole. However, these forums should be held in the public sphere, independent of corporate influence. While this Partnership could be seen as these major tech companies reaching out for public opinion on technology that represents such a major step for human and societal evolution, it could also been read from the perspective that these companies are attempting to persuade the public that they should be at the head of these discussions and subsequent decisions.

By: Warren Fuller

In the world created for David Wong’s 2015 science-fiction comedy novel Futuristic Violence and Fancy Suits (oh what’s this? A link to my post about it last year? How convenient!) there exists a massive, ubiquitous, global social network called “Blink”. The “Blink” network exists as a network of users who livestream the majority of their lives for others users and the public to view at will, either at any given time for any given user or through curated “channels” that group together the feeds of many users into one continuous narrative. In this speculative universe (Which by the way, I cannot recommend enough to anybody who either loves or hates technological progress.) the “Blink” network relies on the normalization of participation to function and accordingly what seems like the vast majority of the population is continuously connected with mini, wearable cameras inserted into fashion accessories like broaches, tie clips, and of course, stylish eyeglass frames (the really expensive ones have lenses that double as personal screens and HUDs). Eyeglass frames much like the ones Snapchat just happened to announce.

Well, first of all, Snapchat is no longer accurate as the company suddenly changed their name to Snap, Inc. and re-branded themselves as a camera company (as opposed to the purveyor of the world’s most popular app for sharing drunken escapades and boobs). Yes indeed Snapch-…dang it…Snap, Inc. is no longer just in the software game with the announcement of Spectacles, sunglasses with a build in wide angle camera so users can make real time, first-person videos of whatever they happen to be doing, at any given time. Well, so long as they are only between 10-30 seconds that is; attention spans are not what they used to be. For me, the announcement of Spectacles (on a side note: are they really going to try and trademark that? Eeep!) came directly out of left field, I had no idea Snapchat was up to anything beyond developing totally sweet new video filters.

While information regarding Spectacles has not expanded much beyond the initial announcement one feature that seems rather unique is the circular video that the camera in the glasses allegedly takes, which allows the video to play seamlessly between vertical and horizontal orientation of the playback device; a feature that YouTube personality Sam Sheffer aptly describes as “orientation agnostic”. Snap also boasts that the camera records with a 115° field of view, which roughly mimics the range of the human eye. This means that the first person videos users capture will play back with the most accurate “first person” view possible.

I myself am not the most up-to-date hip cat when it comes to Snapchat (I mostly use it to send and receive images instead of through text-messages because I live in the stone age and don’t have a data plan), but to me it seems that Snapchat as an application seems to have peaked in interest and usefulness in its current form. So by shaking up the formula and re-branding Snap once again becomes involved in the conversation. So, if it’s what they want, let’s talk about it.

As is the same with countless other entrepreneurial companies, Snap is in a position where they have created a product and now they have to drum up interest and demand for a product that no one asked for and nobody truly needs, not to mention convince everybody that the estimated retail price of about $130 is a steal of a deal. Additionally, we will have to wait for more information from the company answering the inevitable question of personal privacy in a world where these Spectacles are a reality (follow this link to an interesting Toronto Star piece discussing this issue). Unfortunately, details are still relatively sparse at this point.  

I imagine they will have no trouble moving a significant number of units upon release later this Fall but how much staying power can Spectacles possibly have? The world already screamed a resounding “NO THANK YOU” to Google’s Glass which, for all its drawbacks and general awfulness, had eons more usefulness than Spectacles, which have exactly one use: capturing maximum 30 second videos to share through Snapchat (For some more in-depth analysis of Google Glass and how it framed Utopian visions through head-up display advertising I strongly encourage you to check out this study co-written by Dr. Isabel Pedersen and then PhD candidate Lyuba Encheva). In fact, in his interview about Spectacles in the Wall Street Journal, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel repeatedly and purposefully referred to his company’s first piece of hardware as a “toy”.

FIRST CAME ORIGAMI, NOW COMES LASERS: RECONSTRUCTING THE CONCEPT OF ROBOTS 

If you, avid reader, would be so kind as to join me on a trip through the annals of Reality/Shifting you may recall several months ago I wrote about ingestible origami robots being developed at MIT. In the same spirit of re imagining robotic design researchers at the Photonic Nanostructure Facility at the University of Warsaw have developed a new experimental robot; one that most people may confuse with a discarded piece of plastic.

The ‘robot caterpillar’ was initially unveiled in the Advance Optical Materials scientific journal last August. The developmental model of the ‘caterpillar’ has the appearance of a piece of inert, red cellophane, half an inch in length and only a few millimeters wide. The ‘caterpillar’ is composed from liquid crystalline elastomers, a unique kind of plastic (originally developed in the LENS institute in Florence) that reacts when introduced to a specific shade of green laser light. As explained by Rick Lyman at The New York Times the robot’s material reacts to the laser light by “scrunching into a series of undulating shapes that run down its length in wavelike spasms.” The –micro-robot can travel on flat surfaces, climb inclines, fit through extremely narrow strips, and even transport loads up to 10 times its weight.

While the project is still in its infant stages, Piotr Wasylczyk, head of the Photonic Nanostructure Facility at the Faculty of Physics of the University of Warsaw is optimistic that the work being done there will assist with boosting the field of micro-robotics. While institute researcher Mikolaj Rogoz admits that the current design of the ‘caterpillar robot’ does not have many practical applications beyond research, the hope is that will another decade or so of research and development robots like the Warsaw caterpillar could have similar applications to MIT’s origami robot, including ingesting the robot for pinpoint delivery of medications to specific organs inside the human body.

The Warsaw caterpillar continues the scientific trend of re-establishing social definition of what robots can be; Rogoz states “The idea is just starting in science that robots can be something wires and batteries and motors… It can be just fragments of plastic and energy, and the energy source can be provided from outside the robot.”

         While I was doing initial research for this very blog post I was utterly shocked when I came across a word from the English language that I was unfamiliar with (okay that’s not at all true but seeing as this post examines the massive influx of anonymous dogmatism and know-it-all-ism in a connected world I figured some cheekiness was appropriate… moving on). The word in question was intransigent; adjective: unwilling or refusing to change to change ones views or to agree about something. I’m going to put it all on red and bet that everyone reading this post has an intimate familiarity with these intransigent commenters, heck I bet you’ve even participated yourself haven’t you? You argued tooth and nail that Froot Loops were different flavours, you were absolutely adamant, there was no changing your mind. Why? Why do people online get stirred up the point of ALL CAPS RAGE POSTS!!!!! when faceless strangers don’t agree with them on Reddit? With the constant movement toward the embodiment of communication and interconnectivity and the normalization of instant communication with the anonymous online masses firmly established as a common day to day activity, one would think that more research would done on what makes internet know-it-alls tick.  

           Researchers Ethan Fast from Stanford and Eric Horvitz from Microsoft analyzed thousands of Reddit posts over an eight year period and published their findings in their study: Identifying Dogmatism in Social Media: Signals and Models. Reporting on the study, Martin Anderson from The Stack writes “The nature of the discussion influences the likely level of dogma that commenters in engage in”, with topics of politics, religion, and LGBT issues exposing some of the most dogmatic comments. As well, the study suggests that dogmatic commenters tend to put more of a focus on having their initial opinion expressed whilst tending not to stick around and engage with discussion and debate. Additionally Fast and Horvitz write that “engagement with a dogmatic comment tends to make a user more dogmatic themselves”.

By: Warren Fuller

Before I get too lost in my standard rambling tangent I am going to issue to you, dear reader, a massive SPOILER ALERT as I will be making reference to key plot points in the movie I am about to discuss.

 The other day I was browsing through the virtual shelves of Netflix looking for A: something to kill some time and B: something I could write about for this very blog post and, let me tell ya, I came across a doozy. The film I settled on was a specimen from 2014 entitled Listening... Now I had never heard of this film before and the public rating of about 2 stars left much to be desired, but the premise was intriguing to me. Essentially, to summarize the plot, David and Ryan, two graduate students, illegally use their academic grants and equipment stolen from the university to build a secret garage laboratory, in which they manage to invent a method for telepathy. The caveat being that the device only works one way, that is only one person can “listen” to the others thoughts. Predictably,the CIA finds out and wants to utilize the technology for nefarious mind control experiments. Predictably again, issues arise.

 Now it would be incredibly irresponsible of me to recommend this film to you readers as a “good movie”, as it is most decidedly not, unless of course you'd like to participate in a competitive round of Spot the Cliche: one character has funnelled all his money and time into the lab and is about to be evicted, his marriage is falling apart, and he forgets to help his daughter with her science fair project [in an unprecedented cliche within a cliche: the science fair project is, of course, a volcano]. Meanwhile his equally broke partner lives in a one bedroom apartment caring for his ailing grandmother. Add to this the “unexpectedly” smart new girl, the military-haircut sporting government antagonist, and a walloping dose of deus ex machina (just inject these carbon nanotubes we have just lying around apparently, problem solved) and we're left with quite possibly the most cliched film of the past 10 years. So no, don't watch this film if you want to watch a movie thats... you know... good.

However, this film does make some very interesting commentary on the concepts of privacy and free will in the Digital Age, as well as predictions about how tech-assisted telepathy might possibly be used if it is ever actually developed. Midway through the movie our antagonists are caught and arrested by the CIA (the mysterious, pretty, way-too-smart new girl is ALWAYS a double agent, pshhhh and these guys are supposed to be genius grad students) and given the opportunity to work for them in lieu of extensive jail time. In the movie, the CIA wants to use the technology (a device attached to the subjects temple in conjunction with some vaguely explained carbon nanotubes injection) for population and mind control purposes. Paranoid that there may be spies in the underground lab the CIA equips every scientist with a device and a dedicated “listener” to observe and record every thought they have during the day (the Listeners linger behind a glass window in the lab, bathed in red light, always watching, always listening). Here, finally, is where the film finally connected with me, as these creepy “Listeners”, in my opinion, represent the most accurate depiction of telepathy and speculative brain technology I have seen in a film. The film presents the possibility of a future where privacy and free will quite literally do not exist; a future where one's innermost thoughts are no longer theirs alone.

By: Warren Fuller

Throughout the entire 4 year sentence I was forced to serve at O’Neill Collegiate and Vocational Institute I took exactly one class that even landed in the ballpark of teaching me how to use computers. Oh BTT 101, what an inane and, quite frankly, terrible class you were. I learned some nifty Microsoft Excel shortcuts and… well… that’s about it. Now, I did attend high school during the time of the flip-phone, on the very cusp of the ubiquity of social media and high speed internet, so computer skills were not exactly on the forefront of curriculum reform at the time (heck, we were still saving documents on floppy discs at the start of high-school). As much as I would have hated every single endless second of it at the time I have to say, in hindsight, I’m pretty irked that I never received any sort of computer coding education whatsoever during my secondary school years. Yes I know, I could have pursued coding and computer languages at my leisure at any time, but I never got that early taste as a jumping off point (plus my guitar takes up a good deal of my procrastination attention…*2 hours later* OH RIGHT the blog…). According to a study from the American Information Technology & Innovation Foundation reported on Education World’s website, my experience is far from unique.

The report suggests that computer sciences courses ought to be made into core courses at the same tier as traditional science courses in K-12 classrooms. Considering we live in a time where tech jobs are still on the rise while many other sectors are on the decline due to the automation technologies the tech jobs are developing, this makes perfect sense, says me anyhow. Nicole Gorman’s Education World article cites that a 2011 projection from Code.org that the US economy will have added 1.4 million computing jobs but educated only 400,000 students by 2020. Comparing this projection to a recent Wall Street Journal contribution by Kim Nash that reports tech companies having difficulties finding staff with the necessary tech-based skills, suggests that perhaps high schools need to do a better job readying current students for the future world they will grow into.

By: Warren Fuller

Anyone who has followed my contributions to this wonderful blogspace may notice that I harbour a certain… shall I say…distrust, towards those entities of the robotic persuasion. Alright fine you caught me; in my attempt to maintain my aura of rugged (not to mention, bearded) manliness I may have understated my feelings towards robots. Quite frankly, they terrify me. They’re building our cars, they’re DRIVING our cars, and they’re in our HOUSES!! VACUUMING OUR RUGS!!! *shudder*.

Yet, despite the warnings and premonitions that manifest in just about every piece of science fiction, which suggest that perhaps maybe we ought to reconsider this whole constantly upgrading robotic technology at a rate that can only accurately be described as obscene, researchers just can’t seem to stop themselves. These scienticians, researchologists, and robotgineers keep working, designing, and building as if possessed by some sort of forward looking space-age demon, self-imprisoned in basement laboratories, red-eyed and jittery from high-test espresso binges and solder fumes, monotonously repeating the mantra: “Must upgrade hardware. Must upgrade software. Must make humanity obsolete.” Now, it seems some researchers are no longer content with merely creating robots that work harder, faster, more precisely, more accurately, make less mistakes, are more expendable/reparable, can work in dangerous and inhospitable conditions, don’t need to sleep or shut down, and are cheap cheap CHEAPER than *gasp* hiring human people. No, you see because that’s not sufficient. That’s entirely too robotic, not nearly…human enough. Researchers from the Leibniz University of Hannover are working on an artificial nervous system that will allow robots to feel pain. That’s great. Just great.

The initiative, led by Johannes Kuehn and Professor Sami Haddadin, claim that teaching robots to feel pain is important for the same reasons people feel pain, to inform someone that something is wrong and to avoid causing further damage to an injured part/component. If a sufficiently advanced robot is able instantly recognize that it has become ‘injured’, it can then modify its behaviour or motion to prevent further damage or instantly notify a technician that it has sustained damage. The researchers connected an “advanced tactile sensor modeled after the human fingertip” to a robotic arm to demonstrate an artificial reflex reaction to a ‘painful’ stimulus; even demonstrating different degrees of reaction depending on the force exerted. The researchers suggest that this robotic pain research will help robots prevent accidental damage to themselves, as well as accidental injury or worse to their human counterparts and coworkers. After all, robots are pricey initial investments for large manufacturing outfits; companies can’t have them getting scratched or killing people.  

By: Warren Fuller

Cranes have been dominating the origami game for decades (centuries?) now, and while their run at the top has been impressive (especially with that whole folding 1000 cranes provides the origamiist with a lifetime of good luck gimmick), I for one say that it is time for cranes to humbly step down and pass the torch to the origami champion of the next generation. The question now becomes which figure is worthy of the honour? While I personally think the frog should get more love and the origami community at large is pushing hard for the dragon (even the origami community is capitalizing on the Game of Thrones trend), researchers at MIT, the University of Sheffield, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology are working on throwing their own origami challenger into the fray.

The research team, led by Daniela Rus director of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), have spent the last few years developing a tiny origami robot that can be folded up to fit inside a pill capsule and then unfold in the stomach after ingestion and the capsule dissolves. The little rectangular hero will then be able to wiggle and “stick-slip” it’s way through the digestive tract to the appropriate location. The current prototype version is controlled with an electromagnetic field, but the project’s researchers hope that the final design of the robot will be equipped with miniature sensors and an internalized power supply that will allow it to perform autonomously, without requiring an external magnetic field. The hope of the researchers is that the origami robots will eventually be used to perform minor procedures from within the body as opposed to the current option of invasive surgery procedures. Talking about the potential uses of the robot Daniela Rus says “the robot can remove foreign objects, it can patch wounds, and it can deliver medicine at designated locations.”

A video demonstration of the technology shows the robot grabbing a removing a button battery from inside a simulated stomach. The video states that, in the U.S., 3500 of these batteries are swallowed every year (completely understandable, they are delicious with salsa), and while most past through the digestive system without issue, prolonged contact with internal tissues can cause an electrical current which can in turn lead to internal burns. Using the origami robot to infiltrate the body, retrieve the battery, and extract it through the digestive system could potentially be a safer alternative to surgery.

However, as my wonderful girlfriend pointed out, it is infinitely hilarious that we currently live in a society that is completely fine with spending hundreds of research hours (and probably thousands of research dollars) developing miniature human-spelunking robots instead of just… you know… teaching kids not to eat batteries…  

By: Warren Fuller

After a month (and a bit…) off, amidst final exam season stress, zaniness, and just a few buckets of tears it is now finally safe to say “RealityShifting is back baby!! Woohoo!” 

With summer fast approaching I’m sure many of you all are eager to shut those blinds, toss on some headphones to drown out those annoying birds, boot up that brand new VR headset and visit a beautiful digital meadow, check the mailbox to see if your JIBO has arrived yet (it hasn’t), tinker with your spy drones, and check in with your ol’pal Warren here at the blog to find out what those wacky scientists are up to this week. Yes indeed my friends I have finally returned, all is well with the world, and you may now once again rest easy… well… until you read my next few blog posts…

     I mean sure, scientists are still hell-bent for leather on building robots and artificial intelligences to make the human race obsolete (They’re teaching them shapes people! SHAPES! And touch. You know what happens when you make robots aware of the sense of touch? Yeah, I don’t want to think about it either). And sure, they’ve decided to completely bypass sharks and just strap weaponized lasers to US Air Force planes instead… so there’s that. Oh, and there’s that one measly little estimate that drones could eventually replace over $100 Billion worth of human labour, if trends continue of course.      

However! You need not fear for now! For all is well…

By: Warren Fuller

Well its March 17th so I imagine most of you folk reading this post are decked out in your finest greenery and have quaffed a good three or four of those mysterious green beers that only seem to appear around this time of year. Speaking of which, do you ever think about waterfalls, running faucets, and the sound of rain on a tin roof? Just gallons and gallons of rushing water flowing downstream? Oh, what’s that you have to go to the bathroom? Well three or four green beers will do that pretty quick; well go ahead, I’ll wait, it’s not like I’m in the middle of something here…

Yes, it’s St. Patrick’s Day, which means a larger than average beer consumption will eventually be uselessly flushed down thousands of toilets. If only all that extra urine could be put to better use than overburdening the water treatment plants. Fortunately heroic researchers are once again there to solve the problems of our age. While microbial fuel cells that can convert urine to energy have been around for a while now, there have been major limitations in high costs and generally low power production. Researchers at the University of Bath, Queen Mary University of London, and the Bristol Robotics Laboratory are looking into ways to overcome these limitations by using more cost effective materials and as Dr. Mirella Di Lorenzo from the University of Bath describes “We aim to test and prove the use of carbon catalysts derived from various food wastes as a renewable and low cost alternative.”

While microbial fuel cells are still in the developmental stages, researchers hope that they could one day help with the production of sustainable energy in developing countries. However with declining fossil fuel stocks, massive environmental damage, and rising costs of traditional energy production methods, producing energy from human waste has worldwide potential, especially in beer-happy nations like Canada.

By: Warren Fuller

Well ladies and gentlemen, here we go again; March has arrived and with it comes another seemingly endless few weeks of basketball talk, basketball talk, BASKETBALL TALK. March Madness is in the air as diehard basketball fans tremble with anticipation and baited breath to find out if this is finally the year that the Stephen F. Austin University takes home all the gold. GO JACKS! Heaven knows they deserve it… am I right? On top of basketball March Madness brings with it another opportunity to partake in a sacred and time-honoured American tradition: betting on sports. Yes indeed, and when my boys in the SFA Lumberjacks basketball circles around whatever team of certified chumps is unlucky enough to meet them in this year’s finals while you bawl as you watch your agonizingly calculated wagers cycle directly to me you had better believe I’m going to make a Mason Verger martini out of those tears.

See, this year I have an ace up my sleeve courtesy of Louis Rosenberg and his UNU artificial intelligence system. The UNU system works using the principles of swarm intelligence, which works by collecting data provided by groups of people into one synchronized action. According to Rosenberg research shows that decisions using swarm intelligence are significantly superior to individuals acting alone. The UNU software works by having users pull a ‘puck-like indicator’ with a virtual magnet to the desired answer provided on the screen. The puck can only land on a single answer based on a ‘majority rules’ group decision. The kicker for the system is the group has only 60 seconds to make a decision. The indicator’s speed and direction are displayed to the user in real time, which indicates the overall strength of the group’s decision; some decisions are immediate (a group instantly choosing JarJar as the most annoying Star Wars character for example) while others take a little more time based on differing opinions (this group answering whether Hilary will be indicted for emails). The real-time setup also allows users to change their minds and attempt to pull the indicator to any answer of their choosing throughout the 60 second (or less if 60 seconds is not required for a group decision).

While Rosenberg insists that UNU is ostensibly tool to help social researchers study group-decision making processes and that the platform could eventually help pool expert knowledge; the example given was doctors using the swarm collective to make accurate diagnoses. However everybody can agree that the Taylorized ‘one best use’ of this platform currently is betting on COLLEGE BALL BABY! In fact I’m going to go consult the collective right now and join the swarm of my SFA family in the bracket predictions.

By Warren Fuller

The first time I ever heard of the game ‘Go’ was when I first watched the fantastic yet completely insane Darren Aronofsky film Pi, wherein it is used as a metaphor by aging mathematician Sol to describe the unpredictable nature of the universe to Max, the film’s protagonist/self-trepanation enthusiast. Now, while ever since then I have been aware of this ancient strategy game, I have yet to actually learn how to play the game (mostly because I’ve been too busy crushing chumps in Scattergories. Come at me J and K.). This doesn’t really say much about my worldly knowledge when you consider that ‘Go’ is somewhere in the area of 2500 years old. In Japan, China, and Korea the game is still quite a big deal, with traditional ranking systems and official institutions that train and issue diplomas to professional players who dedicate their lives to mastering the game. This mastery is no small feat seeing as the seemingly simplistic game is actually considered one of the most complicated games in the world. So obviously Google has built a computer program that has the potential to beat the best Go players in the world. Heck, by this point who could even be surprised by this news?

The AlphaGo program is a project of Google’s DeepMind artificial intelligence team which was founded by Demis Hassabis. AlphaGo makes decisions in Go games based on going through a ‘learning process’ of playing millions of games against itself and studying over 100 000 games available online. This is a marked difference in the technique used by IBM’s famous AI chess machine Deep Blue, which attempts to figure out all the possible moves in the match to make decisions, rather than ‘learning’ and remembering moves and situations from other games. Since Deep Blue was already able to beat a chess Grandmaster and world champion (Gary Kasparov in 1997) and since the number of available moves in a game of Go is exponentially greater than the already obscene number of potential moves in a chess match, Go was the only game left for an artificial intelligence to overcome a human champion, according to Hassabis.  

On 9 March 2016 the AlphaGo program played the first of its 5 game series against Lee Sedol, considered to be one of the best professional Go players in the world (His rank is 9 dan professional!... 9 dan professional?... What does that mean? I haven’t a solitary clue, but a quick search reveals it to be pretty much as high as the scale goes). After a hard fought three hour and thirty minute battle AlphaGo was victorious over Sedol. While the program had previously swept European Go champion Fan Hui 5 to 0 last October, the victory over Sedol is considered to be a significantly greater accomplishment as Sedol is seen as an icon and absolute master of the game, currently ranked at #5 in the blood-stained world of professional Go players.

This seems to be a recurring complaint as I continue to write these blog posts, but to AI researchers and developers, in all seriousness and with all due respect, STOP TRYING TO MAKE HUMANS OBSOLETE! It’s come all the way down to Go now people. Games are fun; artificial intelligences lack the capacity for even comprehending ‘having fun’. Playing games triggers fundamentally human characteristics: pleasure, frustration, gamesmanship, and a thirst for competition. And we just build artificial intelligences that can absolutely crush the greatest players in the world, even though they lack every one of these characteristics? And people are just fine with that?